No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) (11 page)

It was a dimly-lit apartment Nicasio Urlihrt hadn’t helped her choose and which, according to a letter by a frequent visitor (Dos, a member of
Agraphia
’s second committee), was like “a cave made for a pygmy who obsesses over Jackson Pollock monochromes.” The stuff that was shedding from the walls is called
skip trowel
. And indeed, whoever visited would have shared the letter writer’s sentiments. Even those who spent an evening with the intensely private couple, playing those domestic games Nicasio—despite appearances—particularly enjoyed, would soon begin to miss their own hearth in the grim atmosphere.
After the first death
,
there is no other
.

Eduardo Manjares described Nicasio Urlihrt’s curiosity in women using the adjective “proboscidal” [in … ?]. The zoological term is apt for a man with a large nose, corpulent frame, premature wrinkles, and a clumsy gait. This should be of concern to us because Manjares, who was passing through Buenos Aires, was guilty of an attempt at courteous dissuasion, citing Proust: “Let us leave the beautiful women to men of no imagination.” Nurlihrt, who was good with a riposte, and imaginative (or perhaps just in love), twice emended the citation with the intention of improving it, first saying: “Let us leave the imagination to men undistracted by pretty women”; and then: “Let us leave pathetic theories to men of tragic nature.” Oliverio, Felipe, and someone else were also present.

A few ideas in stories already written (I’m not surprised by the notion that stories aren’t just motivated by ideas: Mallarmé to … Degas?). In “Early,” the first thought in the morning doesn’t correspond with the last one at night (Urlihrt’s program against random ideas). In “The Imitation,” we understand time by the substantive construction of history, not by looking at the clock (whatever that means). Nothing is understood plainly, needs elaboration, explanation. When the crystalline fails us, use the humectant and adhesive capacities of reasoning.

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. It is, on the whole, a merciful arrangement. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to little new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, for both our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so neatly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these creatures that fall so regularly out of awareness into fantasm—invested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.”

Iris Murdoch

Scherzo

Elena told me before entering the bathroom about her weakness for bespectacled men, men who don’t wear watches, men who wear neckties. I caught a glimpse of her removing her clothes [balancing herself, climbing into the bath.]

Near the bath was a pile of Nicasio’s magazines. He could hear her body’s dialogue with the water, her sigh of gratitude for its embrace. Twice I left and twice returned to the same place. Elena said children inherit the way their parents sleep, and their way of getting into water. [I furtively got in, got out almost immediately.] I don’t have children. Elena does. It was raining.

Staccato

Books [abandoned] on the floor: Elena had not been a disciplined disciple. Betrayal in Trilce, inconspicuous satellite.

Approaching the windowsill, a German cockroach’s deafening saraband, the silence of the world I didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to hear. Elena already left the bathroom. Her legs to the iliac crest, her eyes closed.

NO

Parallelism: “The Old Bachelor.”

NO

Elena claimed husbands should either be poisoned or deceived (if possible, both) between the first pregnancy and the (second) tale of Scheherezade.

Mustn’t go back to where one was abandoned. One should know better. Because the right opportunities are scarce (the wrong too plentiful, if one sticks around).

Buried keys

Examples seen in Nabokov, hidden in James. The genius of that other Jeffrey Aspern—the maestro—Ray Limbert, is to be always suggestive, elusive; the opposite in V.N.: visibility of the other’s genius: Sebastian Knight,
The Gift
, John Shade and also the protagonist of
Bend Sinister
.

He was acquainted with the jury. There was an ineffective trio of persons who ignored the fact there was a natural bias in favor of bestowing the prize freely.

O Lord, don’t punish me for that.

Lord, you’ve already done it.

Russian Story. Semblance.

Onomastics
,
renown
,
polynymy
,
and denial in
Agraphia

Eloy Armesto

[Extracting the
Thursday
from
The Man who Was
. Biannual Newsletter of the Universidad Autónomo de Los Sunchales]

Going against Occam’s razor, the nominative entities of
Agraphia
are born to reproduce themselves, to proliferate, and after a short time, be discarded. Their life-cycle can be compared with that of the common cold. “Each syllable of their names, a germ, a potential pandemic.” Categorical proliferation, diametrical. The names function as algebraic permutations that make no difference to the final result. They accumulate, are collected, arrayed, and then
spent
(in the double sense). The metastasis occurs where fame is unevenly distributed. A whole argot of sectarian terms to designate where: first, the “paludinal glitterati” in
Septic Midrash
, then the “phalansterian demographic” constructed to “contradict the anecdote.” In the journal, “there is no theory,” except what makes you rich. Theory, they proclaimed, plagiarizing Proust, is the price tag on a gift. Nicasio Urlihrt was quoted in the newspapers as having said that admission into
Agraphia
relies not so much on intellectual common ground but on the postulant’s mandatory baptism at the font.

So, at the “Sestina Session” they began laying down the (criminal) tracks towards what they believed was an amoral approach to anonymity—the pseudonym—a meeting that ended in compromise instead of unanimity.
The uninterrupted progress of those tracks
, according to “The Change.” For his final choice, Eiralis removes some, alters others. “Notes for a Plagiarist,” by Belisario Tregua, summons those
eroici furori
, four of the nine forms of love, both blind and blinded. With retrospective rage, one or another dissenter will sometimes change even the precursor’s name, exchange it for another. Who is Hilarión Curtis? The anecdote goes that he was a predecessor of Nicasio Urlihrt, although he is not. And in different places the
apic ancestor
appears to make the story seem apocryphal, to submit another dossier to the lore. So that Belisario Tregua, the original Glaucus of Urlihrt, can quickly make the exchange with Sabatani, the
Glaucus et Diomedes permutatio
.

Insofar as
Agraphia
is an extended discourse on the insignificance of names, real or invented—as a Traherne, Arthur Paul Clerkwell, Jacques Derrida, Lord Swindon, Guyotat, Gayelord Hauser—the name or title is an indication of this, and the activity most often adopted by these personages is trying to remember the names of things or, failing this, coming up with new ones … As in “The Dreadmist”: “What name could we have chosen for what was going on. I suggested to them: Gobi, after the desert. Or after the tanguero, Alfredo Gobbi, with two Bs. One of them said aberrations don’t make good names. Optical aberrations, as I recall …” On most of those ruled pages Tregua had specifically chosen for recording the
Agraphia
committee minutes, it’s apparent everyone is involved in the act of coming up with names for people, stories, and various other things.

The other “perdurable aspect,” besides the Arcadian myths, as the members saw them, is the ceremonial, or liturgical, for which they gathered together countless emblems, constructed a host of personas, prepared myriad refutations to any argument that might be leveled against them. There are three tribunals: the first, consisting of three judges, is the casuistical; the second, consisting of twelve judges, is the episcopal; the third, consisting of the nine malic molds, is the diametrically surreal …

When Nicasio and Elena Urlihrt were trying to come up with a name for the journal, they had firmly in their heads the name of Georges Bataille’s review,
Acéphale
. [
Still needed
, Belisario’s letter to Dos, anaphora. Seven times.]

Agraphia
was then forty years old. “Longevity and solipsism have gradually transformed it”—declared Oliverio Lester—“into the strangest and most idiotic literary journal in South America.” Many agree. Its longevity seems to be a result of its strict discretionary code, and a policy of nonintervention so severe, most members have developed hormonal disorders. As only a few other journals have done,
Agraphia
dispensed with all matters concerning the outside world—or according to Lester in an interview, “barely sensed it.” Its members spent their days engrossed, their faces bent towards the page, their thoughts reflecting back from it, as if
Agraphia
was scripture, and everything else Apocrypha. Such interiority results in those
indoor games
which Rómulo Stupía and Répide Sabatani never tire of reproaching, citing examples of the behavior of characters in the stories, and the suffocating absence of chronology. Their output—in “Early,” “Imitation …,” “Xoch. Diary,” “Out of a Greek …”—has been thanks to a pseudonymity that guarantees the absolute identity of the precursor, the template, distinguishing him from the list of alternative names, which are dropped, as it were, throughout a narrative that makes biography, or the story of a single person, read like a “family romance.” As for the length of that story, it is determined by an almost trance-like focus: a focus on the self that admits no external influence and on events that takes no account of any chain connecting them. Luini, who was consulted for a poll by an even more obscure journal,
Jolt
, affirmed that
Agraphia
is “apolitical, glabrous, almost oligo- …” A nice bit of opportunism considering the glabrous and near-oligos were expelled from the platonic republic during those years [Lesiva Víctima: pseudonym of Teodolina Teischer, in
Political Readings
]. It’s curious that so many who scornfully renounce their past services to
Agraphia
, do so in a way that’s characteristic of the journal—with scorn. Rare excursions are sovereign kingdoms [choosing one’s own books, people, situations], small exiles, exclusions …

His first (“anonymous, collective”) task is still only
half-accomplished
. At the height of preparations for the seventh issue, all the compromises, the petty alliances, the underhandedness that so often stymies progress on “the task,” were once again brought to bear for an obligation Nicasio and the apostles didn’t want to be burdened with: writing an editorial. [They would say later, “We didn’t want an editor or a publisher, but we were forced to be both … So we committed parallel crimes pseudonymously, and came out looking like spotless lambs.”] This explains their cross-purpose rationale of both affirming and denying responsibility for what they do. Nevertheless, having not failed to tell the truth, nor tell a lie, they inadvertently found the median, a word in between deception and honesty (perhaps it was in the first anthology). Of the best stories published, three were written anonymously—“Too Late,” “The Fasting of Lourdes,” “Vienna while in Prague”—three were collaborated on—“The Candles,” “Dominion,” “The Scent of Thunbergias”—and five were anonymous collaborations—“A Double Celebration,” “Houdini and Cravan,” “Supporting Acts,” “The Cold,” “Quodlibet” (although the
non plus ultra
of such a collaboration, “Out of a Greek Gift,” appears in the latest issue). Their insecurity, impatience, paranoia—said Luini in the aforementioned interview—made them feel obliged to put on “a show of invincibility.” Buenos Aires: a world already dimming by the late sixties due to the influence of psychoanalysis, according to Urlihrt. But, in the profession, there was a stammer, a nervous tick, a hint of uncertainty. Of Urlihrt becoming more assured in the following decades: “After so many years beating about the bush trying to get noticed, we finally began writing with an eye towards posterity, instead of fame or notoriety … and that happened once we exorcised our insecurities, our fears.” The practice of condescension is tied to prophecy: “As we said without really understanding:
we do everything by halves
. Yes, as we said: it was mainly the programmatic nature of the formulation [or affirmation] that made us take a step backwards, recoil.” In implementing these misdeeds—these “adulterated truths”—there was some fruition; as when Urlihrt used that example from his youth to vindicate “the journal’s ethical principles” … The idea “It’s not what God wants but what God is” that we see in “The Scent of Thunbergias,” and which is distorted and amplified in “Returns,” and seems in both stories to be “an infirmity that walks hand-in-hand with death,” is part of the orthodoxy, the religion of
Agraphia
…